Valve waives $100 Steam Greenlight fee in new “Concepts” section

Compromise lets small devs build community before investing in full listing.

Last month, Valve announced that it would require developers submitting games for consideration on Steam Greenlight to make a $100 donation to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity to discourage frivolous submissions. Developer reaction to Valve's policy was decidedly mixed. In response, Valve has unveiled a new "Concepts" section that gives developers a way to gauge community interest in their project through Greenlight.

Developers don't have to pay a cent to put their early work up in the newly launched Concepts section, where Steam users can view, comment and vote on their favorites, just like the rest of Greenlight. Games posted as Concepts won't be considered for distribution on Steam itself, though; for that, developers will still have to pay to get a standard Greenlight listing.

This seems like a good compromise between accessibility and curation for the fledgling Greenlight service. Chances are, if you have a game concept that's really ready to go up on Steam, you can afford the $100 to get it that serious consideration. But now, with the Concepts section, smaller developers can try to get attention for rougher ideas that might still have merit, while not stealing focus from more developed ideas actively competing for distribution.

Earlier this week, Valve announced a second set of 20 Greenlight games that will see a full-fledged Steam release in the coming months (following 10 titles approved last month). The newly approved games include indie darlings like Octodad: Dadliest Catch and Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, a standalone release for popular mod The Stanley Parable: HD Remix, and even a rerelease for 2003's controversial Postal 2.

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

I honestly stopped looking at Greenlight altogether after all of the complaining and garbage.

This is actually good news, and I'm not being flippant. Ideally, you probably want a relatively dedicated userbase for Greenlight, that will actually look at games closely, rather than all of the (unwashed) masses upvoting everything with zombies and slenderman.

Besides, the huge rush of voters at the beginning was never going to be sustainable.

I've really enjoyed Greenlight so far, though I will admit the opening week was filled with so many fakes it took a lot of the value away from it until they enforced the $100 dollar fee, I hope "concepts" doesn't succumb to this. The people submitting their hard work deserve better than to be buried among illegitimate attempts (I remember one issue they had with Greenlight at first, and even just game submission in general, were people re skinning title screens and claiming the game as their own).

I know it would be a lot to ask for from valve, but it would be awesome if they had some more alpha/beta support.... for example allowing the developer to designate certain steam users as testers to download builds of the game and give feedback/bug reports, allowing steam users to submit requests for betas while sharing their hardware surveys and maybe a written request to the developer... or even a funding system not unlike kickstarter for "concepts."

Edit for the funding: It might be best to only allow that once they've reached a certain up vote goal or something, since initial concepts aren't even guaranteed to be released on steam...

I've really enjoyed Greenlight so far, though I will admit the opening week was filled with so many fakes it took a lot of the value away from it until they enforced the $100 dollar fee, I hope "concepts" doesn't succumb to this. The people submitting their hard work deserve better than to be buried among illegitimate attempts (I remember one issue they had with Greenlight at first, and even just game submission in general, were people re skinning title screens and claiming the game as their own).

Is there any moderation of Greenlight/Concepts projects? If not, why couldn't Valve pick a few from a pool of dedicated Greenlight voters/viewers (I'm sure they have the metrics that shows them what Steam accounts are looking at what) to police it? Maybe give those accounts a shiny badge, and/or a small discount on indie game purchases, or something.

I've really enjoyed Greenlight so far, though I will admit the opening week was filled with so many fakes it took a lot of the value away from it until they enforced the $100 dollar fee, I hope "concepts" doesn't succumb to this. The people submitting their hard work deserve better than to be buried among illegitimate attempts (I remember one issue they had with Greenlight at first, and even just game submission in general, were people re skinning title screens and claiming the game as their own).

Is there any moderation of Greenlight/Concepts projects? If not, why couldn't Valve pick a few from a pool of dedicated Greenlight voters/viewers (I'm sure they have the metrics that shows them what Steam accounts are looking at what) to police it? Maybe give those accounts a shiny badge, and/or a small discount on indie game purchases, or something.

They don't "approve" projects to get put in there, but they do seem to moderate afterwards. When Greenlight first opened up, there was just a huge swarm of submissions. Greenlight was announced a bit before, so I suppose the fake games had a little time to prepare. Once the fee went into place, the number of submissions overall declined, and it did seem to leave only the more serious attempts. The community moderation idea doesn't sound like a bad idea for the Concepts, plus it kinda fits in the whole theme of this being a community driven experience.

I honestly stopped looking at Greenlight altogether after all of the complaining and garbage.

This is actually good news, and I'm not being flippant. Ideally, you probably want a relatively dedicated userbase for Greenlight, that will actually look at games closely, rather than all of the (unwashed) masses upvoting everything with zombies and slenderman.

Besides, the huge rush of voters at the beginning was never going to be sustainable.

Okay.

I upvoted one thing and it had nothing to do with zombies.

But you're completely missing the point. It has already lost mindshare.

What if someone copies an idea from concepts like all those copies of popular/new flash games on the AppStore?

I don't know much about Greenlight so I apologize if this is an ignorant question.

It's actually a really good question. People copying an idea is always a risk, no matter where you talk about the idea. Unfortunately I don't know that there is much protection out there to curtail this behavior other than having the prototype within striking distance of releasing before showing it to the public... but then you get less feedback through development. It's a judgement call on the side of the developers if they find the risk to be worth the reward.

If you don't trust your game enough to put down 100$, maybe it needs some more work. Before that fee it was not just copied games that were problem, but there were masses of games that seemed to be made in 5 minutes and were lot worse than standard free flash game. Its interesting to see if this manages to avoid be too cluttered to find anything.